If you don't understand, you're not paying attention. There's a big difference between saying a word and using a word. He was answering a question about someone else's use of the word and trying to clarify. What he essentially said was "Did she actually say 'n_____'?"
It sounds to me like a few kids at this conference were butthurt for being told they were wrong about completely unrelated questions, and pounced like jackals for anything to make this guy look like a nazi. "I might be completely wrong about Jared Diamond and look like a dumbass... but 'n______' came out of this guy's mouth at some point! Get him!"
“I was asked at a dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself,” McNeil said in his note to the staff. “I should not have done that. Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended. I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgment. For that I apologize.”
Can’t believe an entire career was ended over a moment requesting clarification.
Uncool pointless yelling, because I never said it wasn't.
I just wanted gowld to clarify what, exactly, his/her point was, because it seemed to be rather incoherent. Was gowld talking about Native Americans? I honestly can't tell.
> It’s equivalent to calling people the 4 letter n word.
No, it's absolutely different thing. One is derogative racial slur, carrying a baggage of slavery, violence, rapes, and systemic injustice that's present in the society to this day; and the other one is a description of people who choose to ignore science and are willing to risk life of others basing on their anecdotal evidence.
So, this was clearly racist misinterpretation from the context, but I still didn't understand enough to know exactly why it was racist misinterpretation and was curious.
For anyone else curious, this is maybe a good read:
It starts with the knee-jerk conservative anti-woke reaction, which peaks here:
> A reader in the comments suggests that these students should listen to MLK’s oratory and take a lesson. Absolutely. King was a master of rhetoric. That is the way to change minds. The teachers who are instructing these kids in this sort of thing are guilty of intellectual abuse, as are the CEDA officials who reward it.
But the updates after that, explain what is really going on:
> Rod, this post needs a serious correction. While that debate was ridiculous, it is entirely typical of what college “cross examination” debating has been for decades. The trend has been for (mostly white) debaters to talk about nuclear war in a debate about education policy, the environment in a debate about military policy, post structuralism pretty much whenever they feel like it, etc. etc. It’s a ridiculous form of debate but it isn’t some weird black thing. The reason these black students are debating like this is that they are competing, in a league with teams from schools like Harvard and Yale, that rewards this style of debate.
And the author is slightly magnanimous in his apology:
> UPDATE.3: To be perfectly clear, I concede that I was wrong to say that this team broke the rules of debate by refusing to address the topic, instead choosing to rant about racism, and to say that the woman who looked as if she were having a psychotic break (which she does, to the untrained eye) was doing anything wrong. I learned from readers that the Towson team’s bizarre display is actually well within the rules and the custom of competitive debate. So, congratulations to them, I guess. I learned something new today: Competitive debate is a completely insane phenomenon.
> You are assuming the intent of the poster. Your "civil rights" example does not capture the same (ambiguous) spirit that the poster's use of "woke" captures.
I gave the benefit of the doubt and a warning that they might be misinterpreted.
> As far as I can perceive it, the majority of people haven't arrived at the conclusion that woke is a slur.
> The primary problem with this is that people don't get to make up their own definitions for words, and force those definitions on the rest of society.
Do you think that certain communities should not have their own dialect? Or do you think that if a member of such a community happens to use said dialect outside of the community and later clarified the specific definitions of the words that they used, they should not be given the benefit of the doubt?
> that it's a BS cop-out. They know what they mean when they use the word. We know what they mean when they use the word. Lying about it when they get called on exposes them as the hateful cowards that they are.
I am not black and I have been called a [censored] in the past, quite a few times in fact. It used to be quite common in multiplayer games and certain online communities around a decade ago, it still is but less so. If you know what they meant when they used that word then please do tell me, because I seriously doubt that they believed that I was an african american.
> What is it that offends you about the terms, and why?
Sorry for being unclear. I'm not offended, either. But (see my reply to sibling comment) I find the arguments that the term can be seen as offensive, and that it perpetuates a (small! subtle! but real!) form of systemic racism, essentially plausible, and I'm sympathetic to them.
>It oddly doesn't have a lot of other slurs, like the n-word, etc. Does that mean they are acceptable?
Depending on who's mouth they come out of they kind of are acceptable.
Which is kind of a glaring example of why this whole policing words bullshit is in fact bullshit. It's not the words that do harm. It's the context in which they are used.
> it expresses that one group is inferior, and that he is inferior because he belongs to that group.
Does it actually express that? Or is it a term that is being reached for because someone is upset and it's a cheap insult that the insulter thinks will have a large impact?
You are looking at this stuff in very black-and-white terms. How people communicate is a lot more nuanced than you are giving it credit for.
>assume people can't not form racist views because they can't figure out the context when someone uses the name of a color.
The parent did not do this. It sounds like you've constructed an exaggerated version of a potential assumption somebody other than the parent could make: That a particular person may be feigning "not knowing" what the terms means, which frankly is not surprising, considering how incredibly bitter some people feel about these terms, but of course neither is it surprising to sincerely not know what they mean, since they are new terms, regardless of how explicit they are (you need at least a modicum of context if you've never heard them before). So the person you're attacking surely exists (a person who would make this accusation in every case, with no benefit of the doubt ever given), but that person is not here, nor could we know if they are here given the limited sample size of chances they have in this thread to express such an uncharity.
As for your frostbite example, obviously nobody seeks to control the reality of what color frostbite is. I feel like you may have jumped the gun on that analogy.
You would/wouldn’t be surprised how many people don’t know history and may not know or understand that, but that’s another issue and also why you have to look at it in context with the other incidents. Either the guy is regularly unaware of the implications and connotations of his words or he’s using them on purpose as an expression of his prejudice and either would seem to be an issue.
According to Carl Benjamin himself, the comments were meant ironically. He was reacting to a chat stream, which is missing context in that video, and the chat used slurs like this. So Benjamin used the slurs back at them.
Having said that, we have to assume Benjamin’s inner thoughts to know what he really meant, so I’m not arguing we should disregard it completely because of his alledged good intentions.
Where the machine transcript says "exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with y'all", the last word should be "the alt-right". That is one piece of context: the people he's arguing against are (known for being) racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual.
Further, the "kikes are ruining everything" part seems to be a paraphrasing of the alt-right: "Go and bother, like, mic.com's comment section or something. You know, they are actually getting millions of views? The thing is, they just ignore you, which is why you don't, because you're just attention-seeking. It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"
Later: "It's just like how Mike Enoch was treated, when people found out his wife was Jewish. It's just like, he had to go dark, he had to go off the internet, because of the way these people treat him. It's like, holy shit, that's one of your own? Oh, he's married to a Jew, well, I guess, that's a bit of bad luck to be married before he was an alt-righter. Yes, he did, well, there we go. Kind of like 'Millenial was sucking a dick'. You know, it's like, it's crazy. You guys have no decorum. There's no level too low to go to."
It seems clear that at least the "anti-Semitic" aspect of his comments is, in fact, deniable.
The TLDR is 'don't argue with woke, entitled, powerful/rich teens'. Especially don't do it by being nuanced in your usage of racial slurs - it will go over their heads and it's likely to bite you in the ass.
"Humans aren't robots. They aren't flawless. Every prolific public speaker messes up and says something that's complete nonsense while trying to collect the right word."
Competely agree, what's jarring is that he is replying to a simple question asking to define something that is literally the focal point of his intellectual career. It is possible that he just messed up and said something that as you say was 'complete nonsense'. But for me a simple accident is not the most likely reason given the context.
"Surely this isn't the first time he's been asked this question on camera if it's such an important part of his persona. Why this clip? If he consistently defines it poorly, that's one thing. I can't take what could be his worst attempt to define it as normal."
Fair enough, can you source any other examples of him defining racism?
He was just discussing blackface, racial slurs, and systematic racism with a bunch of teenagers who ended up thinking he was a racist asshole.
Something makes me think this was not a calm, two-sided, conversation amongst equals. It sounds more like he lectured them and belittled their opinions.
If that's the case, it doesn't automatically make him racist, but it does mean he misjudged the situation and what he was supposed to be doing.
That is what he had intended to transmit, but it was clearly not the message that the audience received. Instead, the message they actually got from this conversation seems to have been more along the lines of 'this NYT reporter who is lecturing us about native ctures is throwing around the N word and claiming it's OK to use when he says it or something. This is uncomfortable and annoying'.
If a class is just not learning from a teacher, both the class and the teacher share some of the blame. But since the teacher's job is to teach, and when the class is made up of children or teens, I always err on the side of accusing the teacher first.
Again, not accusing them of Racism! Just of failing to create the understanding and environment they were supposed to create.
It sounds to me like a few kids at this conference were butthurt for being told they were wrong about completely unrelated questions, and pounced like jackals for anything to make this guy look like a nazi. "I might be completely wrong about Jared Diamond and look like a dumbass... but 'n______' came out of this guy's mouth at some point! Get him!"
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